Wednesday, May 2, 2012

How to get your resume "Silicon Valley Ready" - Part I

Per my last post, I've been given the opportunity to review a nice pile of resumes. As I am prone to, this got me to obsess a tad over how the resumes were put together and more importantly, what each told me.

What I perceived as issues are, in retrospect, my fault, not the resume owner's. That's because, per the entire point of my last post, the start-up environment is radically different than the corporate IT department. And the latter is where many of these resumes came from (which is exactly what I wanted and asked for).

In many cases, I received a resume from someone that included the regular set of data - experience, education, skills, etc. But the ones that got me excited were the ones where the person included in the email links to the websites or mobile-apps they had built. As I've said - the number one selling point for you as an engineer to get a job in Silicon Valley is that you love this stuff. There's an age-old conundrum of new grads who say "Employers want me to have experience before they'll hire me - but how do I get experience if I can't get a job?"

In our business I'm happy to say - that problem does not exist. Simply because you don't need anyone to give you a job to build something. A website. A mobile app. Heck, a program that finds smaller sets of strings in larger ones.

I realized that's probably the number one thing I'm looking for. You can show me, with no doubts, that as a software engineer - you can build something. Start to finish.

Interestingly, I like to think that I also don't put that much weight into whether a project was a commercial success. If it was, that's nice but and maybe it's because you are not only a great engineer but you have an awesome product sense - who knows (it just might mean you were lucky too). And unless it wasn't a commercial success because it was poorly engineered, that's not really the point. The point is that you built it. Or at least some non-trivial part of it.

With that in mind - this article sprang forth on what I like to see in resumes. I'll point out that this isn't very different from what I looked for when I was on a hiring committee at Google (so there are at least some current Google engineers that are partially there because of these thoughts).

First - I propose a new section to resumes - at least for software engineers. In addition to Experience, Education, Skills, Interest, and References (not suggesting we remove any of those) - I propose we add Cool Stuff I Have Built.

If your resume is going to go over one page (which, personally, I don't mind) - I'm hoping it's because of this section.

Any project you did solo or had a major hand in - whether paid or not paid, million users or just your mom, I'd love to know about. Websites, iphone apps, android apps, desktop apps, open-source projects, github accounts - you name it. Solo or as part of a team (indicate that). But it has to be, in one way or another "finished". Even if your iphone app was rejected by the app store - you can point me to a link to see it. It doesn't have to be a product either - maybe its an open-source project. The bottom line is it is something that you "finished". You executed. Your idea became a living breathing application or piece of code that in some way some how you could show to people.

The section might be broken up into individual projects with bullet points about each. For example:

Project Name: Mailinator
Technologies used: Java, tomcat, (no database)
Team Size:5'11", 175lbs (haha)
Implementation details/challenges:Custom server architecture built as an experimental test-bed for highly-multithreaded server design. Custom SMTP server. No database as emails are stored in RAM with a custom compression scheme.
Notable Metrics: up to 25MM emails per day, ~20k users per day, runs on a single server (on purpose as part of a personal experiment to optimize the system).
relevant links: www.mailinator.com, http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2012/02/how-mailinator-compresses-email-by-90.html

Surely you could add other bullet points too (and suggestions welcome, leave a comment to this post). But you get the idea.

My previous post resonated strongly with some people - that is, they were in "IT departments" feeling like they weren't growing technically. And as you can imagine, a resume telling me you did a payroll system is great - but it's not what (most) start-ups are building. But what if you haven't built anything? And your "Cool Stuff I've Built" section is empty?

Well .. fix that.

No one is stopping you from building something. No one said you're ready for a transition out of your current job today and as with much of life it's up to you to take yourself to the next level. But nearly any person that already writes software with a penchant for learning and some ambition can spend the next few months of nights and weekends learning and building. (And it's absolutely possible that your day job accomplishments belong in that cool stuff section too).

So if by day you're a payroll guy, but by night you're in iphone ninja - you've got my attention. Not only because you have the skills that I'm looking for - but that in your spare time, you're out doing great things. And instead of going out every night drinking with your friends - at least some of those nights, you chose to stay home and learn and build cool stuff. And why would you do something like that? Simple - you love this stuff.

(My start-up is located in Palo Alto and I am right now interviewing for the initial engineering team. We're well-funded, building cool stuff, and plan to change, ya know, the world. No matter where you are - if you're a software engineer, willing to relocate to San Francisco/Silicon Valley (and of course, love to build great things) send me your resume. paul@refresh.io or check out www.refresh.io/jobs)

3 comments:

Hey, got here from the hacker news link to your node.js post. A long time ago as a college student I was given essentially this advice by a hiring manager. Don't just list your skills, he said, describe projects you have done that illustrate your adeptness at these skills. Anyone who can write "hello world" in a language can list that language as a "skill" on their resume, but if you can point out that you wrote a webserver in that language (or whatever you did) that tells the hiring manager something.

My question for you is, what if every cool thing that you have built in the last 10 years or so is owned by a company that won't let you just post it online? Is my description of the project enough, or will it be rejected out of hand because I can't show you the finished product or the source code for it?

Paul, an interested post as always. I have build a few web related projects myself, and in my experience it has by and large helped me in gaining employment (both contract and as an employee). But there has been a few places that actually didn't like it that I built things things. I'm guessing the reason was that they felt I won't be 100% dedicated to their company.

Building something from scratch teaches you ALLOT, and the one thing you realize pretty quickly is that it takes allot to put something out there, and things that you may have thought would take 2 hours actually take much longer. Along the way you will learn how import a source control system is, automation (build, deployment, server configuration, code generation, etc.), marketing, marketing, etc.

Man, your post is awesomely inspiring :). I develop since I was 12-y.o (I'm 25, I think). From the CD manager app in visual basic to some funky crypto tool in C. That's the real sense of software development :D

And, really, congratz for Mailinator. I've stumbled upon your blog and realized that you developed it. Am I right? Cool!